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HMS Gloriouswas a warship of the Royal Navy.Built as a "large
light cruiser" during World War I, Glorious, her
sister HMS Courageous, and half-sister HMS Furious were the brainchildren of
Admiral Lord Fisher,
and were designed to be "light cruiser
destroyers".They were originally
intended to be heavy support for shallow water operations in the
Baltic
Sea, which use ultimately never came to
pass.She saw
action in World War I, and then was
converted into an aircraft
carrier.While
evacuating British troops from Norway in 1940, she was sunk with
the loss of over 1,200 lives.

Genesis

3-view drawing as completed in
1917

Glorious was built by Harland and
Wolff, Belfast. The
design was for a light battlecruiser;
while having guns, she was actually classed by the British Navy as
a light cruiser because of her light
armour protection. Her keel was laid down on
1 May 1915, the ship was launched 20 April 1916, completed on 14
October 1916, and Glorious was commissioned in January
1917. She cost £2,119,065 to build.

Her machinery was essentially similar to an earlier light cruiser,
HMS Champion, with two
sets to drive four shafts. During a test in 1917, Glorious
managed to fire a torpedo out of one of her
submerged torpedo tubes while moving at
full speed. Under normal conditions, the firing of the underwater
tubes could be done at speeds of no more than , because of
potential damage caused by water pressure at higher speeds. Her
secondary guns were a new type of triple gun, intended to provide a
high rate of fire against torpedo boats and other smaller craft.
However, as it turned out, the loaders for the guns would get in
each other's way, and the rate of fire was far slower than three
single mountings. One interesting note is that it was observed that
Glorious was actually 1½ knots faster on full load
than when in normal loading condition. Because of her light
construction and other faults, causing more than average time in
the repair yard, she was nicknamed 'Uproarious'.

HMS Glorious as
battlecruiser

When Glorious commissioned, she was the flagship of the
3rd Light Cruiser Squadron, and later the 1st Light Cruiser
Squadron. On 17 November 1917, along with
Courageous and Repulse, she engaged light
German forces in the Heligoland Bight, sustaining no damage. In 1918, short
take-off platforms for aircraft were mounted on both 15-inch
turrets. On 21 November 1918, she was present at the surrender of
the German High Seas Fleet.
In 1919,
she was attached to the Gunnery
School at Devonport as a gunnery training ship. Later, she
became flagship of the Reserve
Fleet.

Conversion

When the Washington Naval
Treaty was signed in 1922, Glorious was surplus
tonnage as a capital ship, so the decision was made to convert her
to an aircraft carrier. The
combination of a large hull and
high speed, not to mention an unsuccessful original design, made
her an ideal candidate for conversion. The vessel was converted to
a carrier starting in 1924, and she was re-commissioned 10 March
1930.

HMS Glorious after her
conversion in 1934

conversion started at Rosyth, but when
the Rosyth shipyard closed in 1929, she was transferred to Devonport for completion. Her conversion cost £2,137,374.
When recommissioned as an aircraft carrier, she had two flight
decks: the main flight deck, and at the
bow, a lower smaller 'flying off deck'. During a 1935–36 refit,
this smaller forward flight deck was converted into a gun deck with
anti aircraft guns, and two catapults capable of shooting off aircraft
weighing 10,000 lb were installed on the main flight deck. She had
two levels of hangars, both long, both 24 feet (7.3 m) high. She
could carry up to forty-eight aircraft; when first recommissioned,
she carried Fairey Flycatchers,
Blackburn Ripons, and Fairey IIIf reconnaissance planes; later, the
Fairey Swordfish and Gloster Gladiator types were carried.
Glorious could be distinguished from her sister
Courageous by a longer round-down on her flight deck at
the stern, and by a different type of mast.

The 15-inch turrets that were removed from Glorious during
the conversion were later installed as A and B turrets in HMS Vanguard.

On 1 April
1931 she collided with the French liner Florida, sixty
miles from Gibraltar, holing the liner severely; she took passengers on
board and towed the other vessel to Málaga. Over
thirty lives were lost, one of which was a member of the crew of
Glorious.

Norwegian Campaign

When the invasion of Norway
occurred in April 1940, she was recalled to home waters.
On 23
April, she and HMS Ark
Royal arrived in Britain, and sailed the next day for
Norwegian waters.She conducted a series of strikes on
German positions in
Norway with her Skua and Gladiator
aircraft. On 27 April, she was detached to return to Britain
to refuel, and returned to Norway on 1 May for further attacks.
On this
return trip, she brought some Gloster Gladiators to Norway to
operate off of a frozen lake, but these were soon destroyed by the
Germans.On 28
May, she delivered a squadron of Hawker
Hurricane fighters to Bardufoss, which provided cover for the evacuation. On
this voyage, she sailed without escort because there were no
destroyers available. On 2 June, her aircraft assisted in
providing cover in the Narvik
evacuation. Starting on 5 June, Glorious took part
in Operation Alphabet, the
evacuation of Allied troops
from Norway.

The Sinking

In the night of 7/8 June, the Glorious, under the command
of Captain Guy D'Oyly-Hughes (who
was a submarine specialist and had only ten months experience in
aircraft carrier operations), took on board ten Gloster Gladiators and eight Hawker Hurricanes from No.46
Squadron RAF and No.263 SquadronRoyal
Air Force, the first landing of modern aircraft without
arrestor hooks on a carrier. These had been flown off from land
bases to keep them from being destroyed in the evacuation after the
pilots discovered that a 14lb sandbag carried in the rear of the
aircraft allowed full brakes to be applied immediately on
landing.

Glorious was part of a troop
convoy headed for Scapa Flow, also including the carrier Ark Royal, but in the early
hours of 8 June Glorious requested and was granted
permission to proceed independently, and at a faster speed.
It is believed this was because D'Oyly-Hughes was impatient to hold
a court-martial of his Commander (Air), J. B. Heath, who had
refused an order to attack certain shore targets on the grounds
that his aircraft were unsuited to the task, and had therefore been
left behind in Scapa to await trial. While sailing through
the Norwegian
Sea, the carrier and her two escorts, the destroyersHMS
Acasta and HMS
Ardent, were intercepted by the German battlecruisers
Scharnhorst and
Gneisenau.The
carrier and her escorts were sunk in two hours, roughly
280 nautical miles (510 km) west of Harstad,

The Scharnhorst was badly damaged by a torpedo from Acasta, and both German
vessels took a number of 4.7-inch shell hits. The damage to the
German ships was sufficient to cause the Germans to retire to
Trondheim, which allowed the safe passage of the evacuation
convoy through the area later that day.Bletchley
Park had received information and reports that wirelesstraffic analyses indicated
that Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were out, but
these were disregarded as insufficiently credible.

The loss of Glorious, Ardent and Acasta
went unnoticed and although an estimated 900 men abandoned
Glorious, those that reached rafts drifted for three days
with the eventual loss of 1,519 men in total; there were only 45
survivors. The single survivor from Acasta was rescued by
the Norwegian steam merchant ship Borgund which also saved
38 men from one of Glorious' lifeboats. All 39 men saved by
Borgund were set ashore at Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands on 14 June. According to Winton a further
four survivors were rescued by the Norwegian ship Svalbard
II which was also bound for the Faeroe Islands but was sighted
by the enemy and forced to return to Norway where the four became
prisoners of war.

Lee (page 20) comments that four German radio broadcasts announcing
the sinking were intercepted but were not acted on, as the
Admiralty duty officer was not aware of the naval movements from
Norway because communications between the operational and
intelligence sections were haphazard. Winton also states that the
whole evacuation from Norway was carried out under extreme secrecy.
The Glorious did not have time to send a radio
message.

In 1997, Channel 4 screened a documentary in its Secret
History series entitled "The Tragedy of HMS
Glorious" and showed interviews with a surviving RAF pilot
and personnel from the Royal Navy and the German Navy. Witnesses
from Glorious and the cruiser Devonshire stated that an enemy
sighting report of "2PB" (two pocket battleships) had been
transmitted by radio from Glorious and received correctly
in Devonshire but that the latter ship, under the command
of Vice Admiral John H.D.Cunningham, continued on her
course and maintained radio silence for essential operational
reasons (she was evacuating the Norwegian Royal Family at the time).
More technical details are given by Howland (below). Allegations
were also made by British and German witnesses that
Glorious had insufficient speed immediately available and
that her reconnaissance aircraft were not in use, allowing her to
be discovered and overtaken by the enemy ships, which achieved hits
with their third 11-inch salvo at a range of 26,500 yards
(24 km).

There is a degree of mystery about the sinking of the
Glorious because papers relating to the sinking have a
"100 year rule" embargo on their release.

Approximate sinking position based on last transmission from
Glorious: .Howland quotes the position of
Glorious given in the enemy sighting report as 154 degrees
11 miles to 69N 04E, corresponding to a position of or 260 miles
(480 km) west of Andenes.

See also

References

Siegfried Breyer, Battleships and Battlecruisers
1905-1970 (Doubleday and Company; Garden City, New York, 1973)
(originally published in German as Schlachtschiffe und
Schlachtkreuzer 1905-1970, J.F. Lehmanns, Verlag, Munchen,
1970). Contains various line drawings of the ship as designed and
as built.